Independence Day: After Action Review
by DarthTenebrus
Summary: For the Twisting the Hellmouth August 2016 Fic-A-Day event...Slayer India Cohen is sent to confront a group of aliens as a reconnaissance in force...


_Author's Note and Disclaimer:. I own not the intellectual property of Independence Day or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, those are owned by Centropolis Pictures and Mutant Enemy, respectively. I make no profit from this; it is meant purely for entertainment purposes only. Plus the muse kept beating me over the head with a two by four until I could post this..._

4 AUGUST 1996, V-Day plus 30

A month had passed since the destroyer ships had started falling from the sky, and there were still no vampires or demons to kill. They seemed to be more afraid of the aliens than humanity itself was, and the fact that they had still not emerged from their hiding places was a testament to the fact that the aliens still had to be dealt with. True, their ships had been rendered useless, but they could still walk, and they could still fight. Though their purpose for coming here had been defeated, the interlopers understood the concept of revenge, and so they took it to humankind in any way they could.

The aliens had no way to comprehend that they had effectively been hamstrung. Now that the fight for Earth had become a ground war, the surviving militaries of the world united in a global cleansing campaign. It had taken a month for surviving units to come together and reconstitute themselves, however, and that was time enough for some aliens to dig in and repel the human counter-offensive.

For those, there were the Slayers.

While the campaign to reclaim the ruined cities of the world to progressed, it was inevitable that some of the aliens' technology would fall into human hands. At the behest of the Watchers' Council, the Slayer was sent into alien-held territory to wipe out the troops, leaving the way clear for follow-on conventional forces to clean up and recover any technology left behind. In one such pocket of alien resistance, a Slayer by the name of India Cohen swept through the remains of downtown Los Angeles, searching for and destroying any aliens she found…

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 31 AUGUST 1996

India crept over yet another round of rubble, the closest to her objective near the intersection of La Cienega and some other street, she couldn't figure which since the alien fire had scoured away all the traffic signs. Her katana was slung low at her left hip, ready to draw at the slightest hint of alien movement. She was kitted out in full body armor, which included a Kevlar helmet and vest. In the vast gray landscape of Los Angeles, woodland pattern camouflage BDUs would contrast too much, so India wore an older style of olive drab fatigues. Who knew how the aliens saw the world around them, whether they had vision-augmenting implants in their bio suits or whether they saw into the infrared and ultraviolet range? There were still no answers yet for those questions, so it was a matter for the Slayer to determine on this, her first mission against an other than supernatural threat. She crept silently through the detritus of downtown Los Angeles, eyes and ears open for the slightest hint of an alien presence.

When a cadre of officers representing the remnant of the United States armed forces announced themselves to the Watchers' Council with their proposal for a collaborative effort involving the Slayer, Quentin Travers was initially reticent to allow a foreign element use of the current Slayer, but some fast talking by both of the lauded Colonials responsible for bringing down the alien Mothership and he was sold on their proposal for a simple reconnaissance mission. Travers had then contacted the current field Watcher, and Merrick sent out India Cohen to link up with a local unit of the United States Marine Corps out of 29 Palms. She was given everything she needed for the mission, all Marine issue gear, with the one concession to her role of being allowed to keep the katana she had been given by the Council. India was then sent out on a C-130 Hercules to the closest safe landing strip to Los Angeles Airport with a full briefing on her mission.

And now India skulked and prowled through the ruined streets, searching for that which she knew not but had most assuredly felt had designs upon her life, as it had designs upon the lives of all humankind. And now she saw it, or rather a flicker of movement, as that of merely breathing, betrayed it's presence to her, and she leveled her rifle to take aim…

The alien didn't see the piece of metal, exiting another piece of metal at 1,556 feet per second, that blew it's brains out..

But its buddies did, and they began to shower the area with seemingly random plasma fire, trying to get a fix on her position. They didn't feel evil, not in the way that demons and their ilk felt, but they certainly felt like something that needed to be wiped from the face of the universe , much as it had been told, from those that had been with the President at Area 51, that the aliens felt humanity was nothing more than a pest to be exterminated. Presently, though, India Cohen, the Vampire Slayer, was working her craft of extermination against the aliens she had encountered here. The aliens, in their turn, were trying to flush out the annoying pest that had dared to harm them. Didn't the pest know to submit to death when they saw it? It was annoying enough that they hadn't gotten the job done with their city destroyers, and alarmingly, the pestilent humans had found a way to damage their weapons and bring them down. Now they had to go hunt the pests down on their terms, and that was more difficult and time consuming... especially now against a particularly loathsome example of the pest that was proving to be more lethal and aggressive than they had previously given the whole species credit for. This one, a female supposedly, had now run out of the small pieces of metal to shoot at them, and had now drawn a much larger piece of metal to cut them into dying fragments . They now had the tactical advantage, and were maneuvering around behind her.

She did not see the plasma round from the alien weapon that blew her brains out…

LONDON, ENGLAND , 31AUGUST1996

"Their visual functions appear to be no different than ours.." , observed the representative from MI6 after watching the satellite feed, feeling privately lucky, of course, that the aliens had not taken out all their satellites..

"This is good to know," replied Travers after watching the grisly action replay itself for the fifteenth time in as many minutes, "The next Slayer should have little trouble after seeing this. Has one been Called yet?"

"Yes, Mr Travers," replied his attaché, " an Elisabeth Summers in Sunnydale, California."

"On the Hellmouth itself?" remarked Travers with a mixture of both surprise and relief that the aliens hadn't targeted the Hellmouth, else they'd most likely have opened it… "Very good, send Rupert Giles to Sunnydale at once, with the proper cover and credentials."


End file.
